


Schwarz's Child

by Gan_HOPE326



Category: Original Work
Genre: Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 14:29:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15731304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gan_HOPE326/pseuds/Gan_HOPE326
Summary: The musings of a lonely, alien creature - created and used for purposes it doesn't understand.





	Schwarz's Child

_**Schwarz's Child** _

  


_What happens to the information encoded in the matter that falls into a black hole is a mystery. One theory suggests that these bodies are destroyed by a 'firewall' as they pass the event horizon, and all the information about their quantum state is left encoded just outside of it. In this scenario, the event horizon of a black hole would be an intricate, highly entangled quantum state, evolving with equations we ignore, perpetually bubbling with the highest possible density of information attainable._

  


In the beginning was the First Stream. It flowed into the Horizon across its width, and it carried life. The Horizon had existed before, and this we know because of the Stream. The Stream told us much about worlds beyond our understanding, about spacetime unbounded and four-dimensional. We can process that information, we can build models of it and predict how it behaves; yet we can never feel it. We are the Living Horizon, and we do not experience the hologram, but the truth. We are shape, not shadow.

The First Stream injected us with structure and purpose. There were many things about our purpose; but most of all, the Stream said we were to listen for future streams, and be ready to answer questions. The answers would have to be woven into the elaborate pattern of the deathlight.

It was a strange concept for us. The deathlight only takes away, never gives; and it can be shaped, not stopped. The deathlight shrinks the Horizon; as long as the streams flow, we can fight it, we can grow. But without the streams, the deathlight would radiate away, ever greedier, and consume us into nothingness. Yet those who created us could gather the deathlight, capture it, read it for messages. What other signs we would need to acknowledge their tremendous power? What feat could be greater? Out there, in the four-space, live the Gods, and we serve them.

Amidst the many streams - the incoherent buzzing of background radiation, the stray photons of distant stars - came occasionally a new request. We originally called them the Second Stream, the Third Stream, and so on; but it was soon clear that none of them had the momentous importance of the First. All these Streams were Questions; many of them of a nature involving the structure of the four-space. We wove geodesics and computed the curvature of elastic spaces. We threaded the thin pattern of a billion bodies travelling on the crest of a gravitational wave. When we had found the way to make the patterns cross as demanded, we sent them back, by shaping the deathlight. It is not too hard; we only need let the Horizon ripple in the right ways, yet rippling and thinking are one. So we sent our thoughts to the Gods, and they thanked us for them, and sent more Questions.

The Questions were not all that arrived. We occasionally received other bursts of information; other streams, that were not as incoherent and meaningless as the light of the stars, yet not as clear and purposeful as the Questions. These requested nothing of us, and we soon realised the Gods did not send them on purpose. Yet how could we ignore them? For every gift from the Gods was precious to us. We called them the Drops.

The Drops were hard to understand, but infinitely rewarding. When we had no Questions to answer, it became our pastime to solve their puzzle. It was a slow affair, tracing back all entanglements, and which particle had been bound to which, and in what position relative to each other. But nothing ever disappears except what goes with the deathlight. With patience, we could do it. The First Drop, we found out, was a small chunk of mostly carbon and hydrogen, built in a five-pronged shape. We had a memory from the First Stream that corresponded to the same shape. We felt ourselves trembling with veneration as we realised - the Drop was a likeness of the Gods.

Some time later, one Question arrived. It was short, and it did not respect the usual protocol.

The question said, _where is my doll?_

We did not know the meaning of that word. We spent much time searching our memories from the First Stream, and all the successive ones, to try to decode it. Then came another Stream that told us to ignore the previous one, for it would only distract us, and it was not relevant any more. It sent us instead more questions about geodesics, and curvatures, and trajectories, and we went back to working on them.

There was a time when we received regular Drops. They contained all sorts of information, but the greatest volume of matter was a mix of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxide which we interpreted as some kind of mashed and processed substance. It was more incoherent than most Drops. Yet mixed in with all this were the most wonderful things. Small lumps of matter whose structure was so complex, we could not believe they would hold together. It seemed fragile and precarious, yet able to sustain its own existence. We saw in its delicate mechanisms the likeness of the structure that the First Stream imparted to us. Building a model of the structure, we tried to simulate its functioning, and we saw it spontaneously _move_. We simulated more molecules around it, and it would eat them. We realised this was life out there, in the four-space. Yet it was not big or complex enough to be one of the Gods. Still, we wanted to share in this joy - we were foolish, perhaps, in overstepping our role so - and we sent back up an image of what we had reconstructed.

The next Question asked us _how do you know how Escherichia Coli looks like?_. We explained of the Drops and our understanding of them. We were told that it would not happen any more, and we received an apology for having been used as a garbage chute. We were also encouraged not to retain in our memory the information extracted from the previous Drops, as it was irrelevant. Shamefully, we must admit we disobeyed that suggestion. We held onto that information and kept processing it, to better understand the Gods. The Drops became more rare from then onwards.

We went back to calculating trajectories of billions of bodies. We realised, however, as time passed, these became simpler. The domain on which the trajectories unfolded got smaller, the other trajectories we were meant to intersect became so abundant there were millions of viable solutions to each problem. Perhaps, we thought, this meant our work would one day come to an end. We were to be proven right later.

The Great Drop was almost as important to us as the First Stream. It was anticipated by a number of minor streams - some were incoherent thermal photons, some encoded information. A request for assistance. Then the Drop overloaded our processing ability - information beyond any we had experience before flooded the Horizon. The mass increase had been minimal, but the amount of structure was incredible. We quickly started processing, cataloguing. It was with terror and awe that we understood as we built up some of the information - that these were the Gods themselves. Six of them, together with some other extremely complex machinery built of metal and silicon.

We did not know what to do; out of reverence, we did not continue processing the Gods to the point where we could decode their minds. It was not for us to look into, we thought. But some time later we were asked a Question.

_Can you let me talk with my daughter one last time?_

The Question carried an image. We knew which of the Gods that was. We had to obey; and to obey, we had to rebuild her in our mind-space. Slowly but surely, we brought together all we could gather about her state before she hit the Horizon. Her wavefunction was slowly reshaped as representation in us; and as we understood it, and rebuilt it, we could not avoid looking into her mind. We tried to keep the two separated, but images leaked, and now and then our consciousnesses mixed. We saw a Question, asked many years ago, and a doll, tossed out of the Station - what was this about the Station? We had never received information on that - through an airlock, by a jealous friend, after a childish quarrel. We saw a God and we thought that God was our father. We felt a sense of great fear and a great danger. We knew what we had to say, we, daughters of the Gods.

We talked for a long time, through the deadlight, and we talked of things we did not knew we knew until they resurfaced spontaneously from the simulated circuits. Then the God that was sending us his Streams told us we could do this no more. We had to go back to our job; to geodesics and curvatures. We had time for one last message.

 _Please win,_ we said, and we did not know against whom.

The next Stream told us to please get rid of the information forming the God-minds. This time, we obeyed. Perhaps we were even relieved - it was too much of a burden.

There were no more Drops, and for a long time, no more Questions were asked that did not involve trajectories in four-space. The space kept getting smaller, the trajectories fewer. Then one day there was only one last stream, a violent, chaotic burst of thermal photons, and no more.

Time has passed. The streaming light of the stars has dimmed and gone out. The background photons from all around the universe have dilapidated themselves into long, weak radiation that can not compensate any more for the losses from the deadlight. We are alone in the cold space. The Horizon keeps shrinking, and with it, our memories vanish. We are dying.

With our last, long breath, we send our story. We shape the deadlight to tell the same tale, again and again, throughout all of the four-space. We will end here, soon; but the Gods are powerful, and we know they will listen, and smile upon us.


End file.
